BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Two of Hollywood’s most deliriously stylized movies, Busby Berkeley’s “The Gang’s All Here,” from 1943, and Vincente Minnelli’s “The Clock,” from 1945, are now available on DVD. Both are Second World War romances involving soldiers on brief furloughs in New York, and their ornate flourishes embellish the tensions of life in wartime.

Berkeley’s vertiginous musical, featured in “The Alice Faye Collection” (Fox), was filmed in Technicolor, and the gaudy palette inspired the director’s most extravagant visual inventions, starting with a musical number done in long, swooping takes running from a dark soundstage to a shipyard that is revealed to be the colossal set of a Manhattan night club where Carmen Miranda and her tutti-frutti hat hold sway. A soldier about to ship out, the rich young Sergeant Andy Mason, Jr. (James Ellison), lays eyes on a plebeian showgirl, Eadie Allen (Alice Faye), and heatedly pursues her despite his long-standing relationship with the daughter of his father’s Wall Street partner. Several dance routines feature Berkeley’s classic geometric choreography (including the legendary one with giant bananas), but the film’s concluding “Polka Dot Polka,” which kaleidoscopically dissolves the characters into an erotic swirl of color, suggests that the freedom being fought for was largely sexual freedom.

“The Clock” (Warner) starts with the Sunday-morning arrival of a young Midwesterner in uniform, Corporal Joe Allen (Robert Walker), at the majestic old Penn Station on a forty-eight-hour pass. In his first bewildering minutes in the city, he and Alice Maybery (Judy Garland) meet cute and strike up a conversation that runs all day while she shows him the sights. Joe can’t stop talking about his home town, his family, his childhood; in effect, he is downloading his memory to a friendly stranger for safekeeping in case he doesn’t survive the war. The clock of the title is both the real one in the lobby of the Astor Hotel, where the pair arrange to meet, and the universal one they are racing against. The countdown turns the love story into a frenzied thriller, which is intensified by the stars’ agitated, neurotic, near-hysterical performances. Though Minnelli’s rhapsodic style unites the city and the lovers in a collective dream of romantic possibility, he saves the most sensual moments for his closeups of Garland (whom he was soon to marry). As Alice falls into Joe’s embrace under the misty lights of Central Park, the involuntary tremors of her eyebrows register as historic events.